One of the themes is about two language students, Beata and Kira who are faced with foreign cultural content in a textbook. In the workshop Adrian uses his grammar of culture to discuss and make sense of the different issues. Below is the fourth video in the series together with Professor Holliday's accompanying text.
Watch part 4 'Building on existing cultural experience' below
I am assuming that Kira’s attitude and approach is preferable, and that this is what teachers should encourage in Beata. In the same way that we encourage our students to recognise and transfer communicative competence from their existing language(s) to English, we should help them to recognise and use the resources of their existing cultural experience.
Statements about culture
There are however prejudices about culture which we need to help our students to see around. These prejudices come out in common statements about culture. For example, some people go on about how they respect the individual in ‘their culture’. In reality they are probably not much different to people everywhere. This is just how they want to represent themselves. Beata needs to examine her statement that people in ‘her culture’ never split the bill.
There are also statements about culture in textbooks. They also project images which can be far from the true complexity of society, which can sometimes be a commercialised British or American ‘culture’ brand. Beata must therefore not take at face value what might appear to be an English cultural norm.
This brief analysis of the experience of Beata and Kira suggests what we might do when our students say there is a cultural conflict with an expression in English. we must not accept the notion of an uncrossable intercultural line which restricts creativity. We must encourage our students not to take cultural difference at face value, but to find answers in their existing intercultural experience, and to find potentials for creative cultural negotiation.
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Watch the other parts of this presentation.
Part 3: Finding positive connections